As large enterprises have acquired more and more diverse information technology (IT) resources, dealing with the large numbers fluid resources has become both technically and administratively cumbersome. Thus, a premium has been placed on effectively documenting and managing an enterprise's configuration over time. The value of a process or system that enables well-executed and planned changes to an enterprise's IT resources goes beyond the value of the organization's investment in hardware, personnel, and software. How efficiently changes and updates are carried out has a direct bearing on the quality of IT services provided to an enterprise.
Identifying, controlling, and reporting on the configuration of IT resources in an enterprise is essential to the continuity of business operations. Across industry today, the configuration of the IT resources in an enterprise is often managed with labor intensive and relatively inaccurate processes that involve searching through text-based records in databases. In at least some cases, multiple types of information about current, past, and planned IT resource configurations must be gathered from disparate databases, and in some cases past states of the system are not even documented, making it difficult to predict the impact of planned changes.